March 2007 Entries

The following announcement was made recently on the Analysis Services forum. A collection of best practices on the design of OLAP objects in Analysis Services 2005 is now available at http://www.microsoft.com/te... These tips were gathered from the product team and our parners in order to help people create better OLAP databases. It looks like a lot of these Best Practices have been incorporated into the SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer tool ......

The interview with ZD Net that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago was published today. You can see the full article here http://www.zdnet.com.au/mic... It will be interesting to see what questions I get as the interview was based around the topic of "Business Intelligence for the CIO" - so I don't expect to get any trick MDX questions :) ......

I just checked on the PRometric and Pearson Vue sites and both of the new Microsoft BI Certifications are now fully available for you to sit. I don't normally browse through the exam lists on these site :) but I got the confirmation email that I had passed the beta of the Technical Specialist (70-445) exam a few weeks ago and the one for the IT Professional exam (70-446) arrived over the weekend. This was my clue that the beta process had been completed and the exams had been released ......

Myself and a couple of the other Australian SQL Server MVPs (Greg and Greg) are participating in a series on ZD-Net Australia. http://www.zdnet.com.au/mic... My "interview" is coming up on March 26th, it's titled "Business Intelligence for the CIO" I will be curious to see what sort of questions I get ......

Chris Webb blogged about the new Custom Reports feature that was added to SSMS in SP2 here http://cwebbbi.spaces.live.... while SP2 was still in CTP. These reports work great for the relational engine. However, while there are a number of standard reports that have been added for various SSAS objects, if you go to add your own custom reports you will find the following: Notice how the "Custom Reports..." option is greyed out? Apparently Custom reports are only supported ......

There was a question recently on the Analysis Services forum asking how to get a list of the Warnings from a Process() method in AMO. There is an overload to the Process methods which includes an xmlaWarning collection, so this should be a pretty easy thing to do - right? Wrong! It's not as easy as it first appears. After inserting an invalid record into the fact table of a test cube, I was able to process the cube using the Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) and see the relevant warnings, ......

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